Lord also told Breitbart, “Had I known that this would happen, I’d have done it again. This is very much about free speech.”

Yes, and it was CNN’s free speech to get rid of him.

Because the conservative arguments are so lame they can be mocked simply by quoting them, let’s focus on the liberal response. It’s actually dangerous.

Wrote Slate’s Justin Peters last week: “The only thing dumber than how Lord left the network, in fact, is how he got there in the first place.”

Peters explained…

After Donald Trump complained to CNN that the network wasn’t being nice enough to him, CNN responded not just by letting him propose some people who would be nice to him, but by actually putting one of them on television ad nauseam. It’s sad but not surprising. If CNN’s political-commentary programming stands for anything, it is for cheerful acquiescence to the demands of the powerful in the name of false balance.

Peters defines “false balance” as “the flawed journalistic impulse to give each side of an argument equal time and weight regardless of each side’s relative standing to facts and truth.”

He calls Lord “a marginal gadfly” who’s “really, really awful.” So who would Slate choose to represent President Trump’s side on the air? Who’s just Trumpian enough not to offend? Who passes the Peters Test? Does anyone?

During the presidential election campaign, the network hired a number of pro-Trump voices just to speak on behalf of the candidate, considering that its stable of reasonable conservatives wouldn’t perform that service. The result has been something approaching madness, with red herrings, false equivalencies, non sequiturs, disjointed rationales and every other polemical foul imaginable besmirching CNN transcripts.

(As an aside, those last six words perfectly sum up “media elite” writing.)

The fact is, Trump won enough votes in enough places to be president. As you can tell from the conservatives rallying to him, Lord speaks for many of these voters — nearly 63 million of them.

If those millions have embraced “false equivalencies,” then it’s not “false balance” to let those be heard. Even if they’re wrong. Especially if they’re wrong.

I frequently watched Lord on CNN and was glad for it. In less than a minute, I understood today’s defense for whichever foot Trump had inserted into his mouth. More importantly, I heard it unfiltered by smarmy journalists.

I love my own kind, and I hate Donald Trump, but damn. There are times when I read and watch my peers, and I just want to choke them with the cords to their keyboards and microphones.

The very definition of “media elite” is the conflicted belief that Trumpsters like Lord are both unbelievable buffoons and public threats. It’s insulting and infantilizing when the media insists our republic can’t survive asinine opinions.

Does anyone really think Lord swayed a single voter in his two years on CNN? Hell, he was immediately gang-challenged on the air, and no corner of the internet failed to fact-check him.

While Lord swayed no liberals, the opposite might accidentally be true. Watching the shit shows, I can imagine at least some Trump “protest voters” are wondering if Hillary Clinton really would’ve been any worse. I can also imagine a politically curious pre-teen watching the likes of Lord, Omarosa Manigault, and Kayleigh McEnany — and thinking, “I have friends in the sixth grade who are smarter than this.”

Yet Peters and Wemple want to purge these voices because America isn’t smart enough to realize they’re ridiculous. But if that happens, it’ll only drive more people to Breitbart and Hannity.

CNN did its job by hiring Jeffrey Lord. It also did its job by firing him.

I don’t expect Hannity to see that, but I have higher expectations of my fellow journalists. It’s downright scary that Peters uses the F-word…

This impulse is the most insidious form of, yes, fake news: cable networks’ habit of hiring superficially articulate frauds and fakers to interpret the news, in the process falsely equating their bad opinions with informed people’s good ones.

If Peters and Wemple ruled the media world, I wonder how they would decide whose opinions were “bad” and whose were “good.” Maybe that should be Rule No. 3….

Never let journalists run things.

5Comments

Your analysis maybe facile (thesis: everyone is wrong) but your illustration is first rate, here and in several other posts. Who does them? Why aren’t they receiving credit? I’m always disappointed in high-caliber news outlets which labor over every word but then top them off with shlockiness like this –https://goo.gl/EaEmSn

All establishment pundits lie for their masters. Shit, everyone on cable news is towing a company line, whether its Dems or Repubs, Bernie bros or Trumpettes, KKKers or BLMers. The Trump pundits offended MSM sensibilities because they took lying to a totally new and insane level. There is a certain amount of lying (a.k.a spin) that the governing class has learned to tolerate as “good politics”, but beyond that and they sniff that populism is out of control. Trump is a cancerous growth and I’ll be glad when he’s gone but I admit to being amused in this one area.

Anderson Hannity: your false equivalency is showing. Anderson Cooper is NOT the opposite of Sean Hannity anymore than Black Lives Matter is the opposite of the KKK. While you acknowledge Trump’s spokespeople are lying at an “insane” level that exceeds any previous political discourse, your A-B fallacies make me wonder if you truly understand just how evil these times are. I also disagree with the OP that our Republic can easily withstand this evil. Republics are fragile entities susceptible to dictatorial usurpation. If it can happen to the ancient Romans, it can happen to us. And as we slip into empire, you and the OP will barely notice because “everyone is wrong.”